Joe Leydon

By: HEATH HAMILTON

Published 7:00 pm, Thursday, August 11, 2005

March of the Penguins is chillingly fantastic

Consider the delightful irony: A movie set in a land of seemingly endless winter has turned out to be the sleeper hit of the summer. And mind you, I dont think its simply a case of audiences wanting to beat the heat by immersing themselves in Antarctica.

March of the Penguins a fascinating French-produced documentary that has made the quantum leap from art-house exotica to megaplex crowd-pleaser is a bona fide hit because of its strong appeal as both family-friendly entertainment and surprisingly gripping drama.

Director Luc Jacquet and his production team spent 13 months in the frigid Antarctic wilds to shoot harshly, strikingly beautiful footage of emperor penguins in the birds natural environment. And then, with the invaluable aid of editor Sabine Emiliani, he shaped this material into an absorbing account of mating rituals and parental instincts.

The early scenes briskly clarify the specifics of geography and zoology, showing hundreds of penguins emerging from icy waters to trek countless miles across vast icescapes toward traditional breeding grounds.##M:(full story)##

Jacquet has some fun with the details of penguin pair-offs since males are in a minority, each female penguin is extremely possessive of a potential mate and he gets some big laughs by showing jealous birds slapping and pecking at suspected romantic rivals.

Gradually, however, the movie reveals its true colors as an unblinking witness to survival of the fittest. Once the female penguins lay eggs, they immediately head back to the far-off waters from whence they came, to procure food.

Meanwhile, males are left behind to hatch the eggs and, eventually, nurture offspring until the return of the sustenance-bearing mothers.

While hordes of males huddle together for warmth as freezing winds blow and mighty blizzards rage, females risk being eaten alive by predatory sea creatures as they fish for tasty morsels. Inevitably, some penguins are felled by the elements, then blanketed by the snow.

And more than a few of the offspring die aborning.

Jacquet renders this singularly brutal life-or-death struggle against natural forces with a vividness of detail that might frighten very small children. But the spirit-lifting finale of March of the Penguins should delight audiences hearty enough to brave the journey. Its worth noting, by the way, that this is one of the few French-produced features I can recall that actually gained something in translation.

It was still known as La Marche de lempereur (rough translation: The Emperors Journey) when I first viewed it in January at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. And I can report that, in its original version, in French with English subtitles, the movie took a markedly different approach to its subject matter.

Specifically: Jacquet focused on a single couple out of the thousands, individualizing the pair by employing actors Romane Bohringer and Charles Berling as vocal talents to create the illusion of penguins murmuring sweet nothings to each other. No kidding. Its easy to understand, of course, why the filmmaker might have wanted to personalize his story with anthropomorphic affectation. But trust me, its difficult not to laugh out loud while nuzzling penguins pledge their troth as each others soul mate. And I seriously doubt that the end result would have been any less hilarious had American actors been hired to redub the French-language soundtrack.

The revised version prepared for U.S. release is a more traditionally objective nature documentary, with Morgan Freeman sounding the perfect notes of bemused wonderment and sympathetic seriousness as off-screen narrator.

Here, the penguins are viewed en masse, not up-close and personal. And yet, rather than diminish the drama, the revision serves to make the movie all the more mesmerizing.